Review: Tetra's Escape (Switch)

by Michael Brandse 

Tetris, the puzzle game. 

Tetra’s escape is what happens when you take the pieces in Tetris and instead of just dropping them to dorm lines, use them to find a way to an exit instead. In Tetra’s escape, your goal is to turn, flip and otherwise use tetrominoes to build a road and have at least one tetromino reach the exit of the level. The game starts simple enough; you can do pretty much nothing but hop onto a simple ledge. The more you advance, the more options are made available to you, from simply changing a tetromino into its shape, to being able to rotate and flip that shape. It’s easy to understand, especially since Tetris is such a well-known game and every single one of us has likely played it in some form or another.

It’s a shame then that the game gets boring rather quickly. It’s very easy, especially if you have some experience with puzzles games. New game-play elements take too long to be introduced. The world itself is also not all that interesting. Every level essentially is just a bunch of high places where correct placement of tetrominoes is all that is necessary to advance to the next level. I would have liked to see some differences, such as switches, moving platforms and whatnot. It would have made for a more creative use of the tetromino shapes and perhaps more creative puzzles. As an extra challenge, the player can collect three stars in each level and, when those three stars have been collected, a trophy that appears. Unfortunately, other than making things slightly more challenging, there is not much reason to collect them as you cannot really do anything with the stars and trophies. At least, I have yet to find anything I can do with them.

Visual design wise, the game is inoffensive enough. It’s colorful, with an art design that reminds me the most of Super Mario 3D land, except less detailed. Variation however is very lacking. Every level has only got minor color differences and eventually, everything just starts to feel the same. The world map doesn’t do much to alleviate this either. Each world within the world map are just palette-swapped versions of one another.

All in all, Tetra’s escape is okay. It’s interesting for a while, but doesn’t do much to keep your attention. If they had just been more creative with the level design, it could have been a great puzzle game. As it is however, it plays it a bit too safe and suffers because of it.

Final score 5.0